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WordPress 3.4 Update and Genesis

As many of you know, WordPress 3.4 was officially released. We wanted to let you know that we’ve updated the StudioPress site and all of the Genesis child theme demo sites — and all is well.

This is our way of saying “Go for it, you should safely be able to update to WordPress 3.4!”

Updating WordPress for Genesis Users

The development team here at StudioPress is always working with the bleeding version of WordPress. As a result, we can confidently say that there aren’t any major issues with WordPress 3.4 and Genesis 1.8.1.

There is a minor issue we are aware of that occurs on the Theme Editor page, which results in some warnings being display at the top of the page. This will be addressed in an update, but you should be fine to keep running Genesis.

If you notice anything else, please let us know. As always, it’s safe to do a database and theme backup before updating WordPress.

Now that WordPress 3.4 is out, we’ll begin Genesis 1.9 development. This should include support for HTML5 among other enhancements and bug fixes.

What’s New in WordPress 3.4

The biggest change in 3.4 is the theme customizer which allows you to play around with various looks and settings for your current theme or one you’re thinking about switching to without publishing those changes to the whole world.

For themes that support it, you can change colors, backgrounds, and of course custom image headers. They have more planned for the customizer down the road.

Throughout the rest of the admin you’ll notice tweaks to make your everyday life easier. For example, if you have lots of themes they’ve made it quicker to browse them all at once without paging.

It’s possible to use images from your media library to populate custom headers, and for you to choose the height and width of your header images.

They’ve expanded their embed support to include tweets: just put a Twitter permalink on its own line in the post editor and it will turn it into a beautiful embedded Tweet.